Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Lovely? Not a catalog beauty: her nose slightly hooked, her paleness might have been passing for sickly in an era where everybody seemed to have at least some color, and also there was an inelegance about the gait, the unsteady way in which the foot met the ground, as if one was shorter than the next and she kept forgetting which. That said, she was tall, her hair was long and draped her shoulders like a cape, her eyes were small and as perfectly oval as Fabergé miniatures, their gray the sobering shade of a Petersburg morning above Master Fabergé’s workshop; and, from Vladimir’s vantage point that first evening, there was that minimalist velvet dress that showed off her small, round shoulders, almost luminous under the sharp Fifth Avenue streetlamps (not to mention the smooth straight white of her back, crossed by two velvet straps).

FINALLY,the lovely and interested friends. They were found that evening amid a spread of black light and loud jazz, the uppermost floor of a TriBeCa loft building. Before it was cleaned the place must have looked like a cattle car traveling cross-country, since now it was all but empty—a couple of couches, a stereo, uncapped bottles of booze that had to be stepped around or picked up and used.

They were a savvy-looking bunch, clothed in the new Glamorous Nerd look that was fast becoming a part of the downtown lexicon. One specimen in a tight, square, wide-collared, polka-dotted shirt was shouting above the rest: “Did you hear? Safi got a European Community grant to study leeks in Prava.”

“Fucking Prava again,” said another, clad in brown geek pants and penny loafers loaded with actual pennies. “Nothing but a tabula rasa of retarded post-Soviet mutants, if you ask me. I wish the Berlin Wall had never come down.”

Vladimir looked on sadly. Not only had he spent his entire life without winning a single European Community grant, but every pathetic piece of clothing he had been trying to shed since he emigrated was now a prêt-à-porter bonanza! Penny loafers! How insufferable. And how old these glam-dorks made him feel, him with nothing but a lousy goatee and the affixed title of Immigrant to temper his protosuburban wardrobe.

He skulked off to another room to meet Francesca’s friend Frank the Slavophile. Frank was a man as short as Vladimir, and even thinner. But from this sticklike figure there billowed a head as tumescent as poori bread—a Rudolphine red nose, bulbous chin, cheeks so slack the skin above was creased from their weight. “I’m dragooning the whole gang into reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches this summer,” Frank informed Vladimir while pounding a Dry Sack of sherry into Dixie cups with only partial success. “No man, no woman can claim to be kulturni without having read the Sportsman’s Sketches. Tell me I am wrong! Tell me there is another way!”

“I have read the Sketches many times,” said Vladimir, hoping his childhood excursions to the Kirov Ballet and the Hermitage had made him kulturni enough for his new friend. In truth, the one time Vladimir had skimmed the Sportsman’s Sketches had been a decade ago, and the one thing he could remember was that they were mostly set outdoors.

“Molodets!” said Frank, meaning “good fellow,” a term often used by older men to congratulate those younger. How old was this Frank anyway? His closely cropped hair was at stage two of male-pattern baldness, the stage where two hairless half-moons are scalloped out at the temples, as opposed to the little crescents that were indented into Vladimir’s hairline. So, twenty-eight, twenty-nine then. And likely a graduate student.

Could it be that they were all graduate students and only Francesca was still in college proper? It could be. The age bracket fit. So did the way they got their jollies—a gaggle of them crowded around a television showing an Indian movie where the romantic principals went through the motions of love but never kissed. And as they touched lightly and coquetted to the sound of sitars and bangles—this dark Romeo and Juliet of the subcontinent—the crowd shouted “more!” and “lip action!” This was in one part of the loft…

In another was Tyson, a Montana Adonis, six feet tall with a leftward-pointing isosceles of blond hair, speaking to a small woman dressed in a sheer sarong and embroidered flip-flops. Speaking in Malay, of course.

The celebrated Tyson quickly took Vladimir aside. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said, lowering his head to Vladimir’s level—a most natural motion, like the swing of a boom. He must have had many short friends, such as that ethereal young woman from Kuala Lumpur. “And a pleasure for Frank… We’ve always been trying to find a nice Russian speaker for Frank.”

“It’s good to be here,” Vladimir said out of gracious instinct.

“Here? America?”

“No, no. The party.”

“Oh, the party. That. May I speak frankly, Vladimir?”

Vladimir reached up on his toes. Tyson’s mouth, a large, jutting affair, was ready to expel something frank. What could it be? “Frank’s in a terrible state,” Tyson said. “He’s nearing nervous collapse.” They turned to the Slavicist who was actually looking pretty good there, surrounded by many attractive bespectacled women with lots of laughter and sherry between them.

“Poor man!” said Vladimir, and he meant it. For some reason, this Turgenev business did not seem a good portent.

“He had a disastrous relationship with a Russian woman, a young lawyer from a very predatory family. It went from bad to worse. First, she ended things. Then he was hounding her in a Brighton Beach restaurant where the waiters took him out back and attacked him with skillets.”

“Yes, it happens,” Vladimir said, and sighed on behalf of his temperamental ilk.

“You know how much all things Russian mean to him?”

“I’m starting to draw a picture for myself. But I should tell you right away that I have no Russian women relatives worth noting.” Well, there was Aunt Sonya, that Siberian tigress.

“Then perhaps you can take him out for a walk every once in a while,” Tyson said, squeezing both of Vladimir’s shoulders, in a way that reminded Vladimir of the friendly, well-bred denizens of his progressive Midwestern college; the long, stoned rides in his Chicagoan ex-girlfriend’s People’s Volvo; the nights spent drinking himself unconscious with humane scholars who cared. “You could talk in the mother tongue,” Tyson continued. “Of course, it would be better if it were winter, then you could both don those nice furry hats… What do you say?”

“Ah!” Vladimir looked away, that’s how flattered he was. Half an hour into the party and already they were asking him to help a friend in need. Already he was a friend. “This is possible,” Vladimir said. “I mean, I’d love to.”

Following those words, those right-felt, inspiring words, Vladimir was crowned with a halo. Why else would the whole party suddenly abandon the far reaches of the loft and crowd around him, asking him questions and at times gently holding on to his arm? The inquisitive wanted to know: What was his prognosis for Russia following the Soviet Union’s collapse? (“Not good.”) Was he bitter about the new unipolar world? (“Yes, very.”) Who was his favorite Communist? (“Bukharin, by a kilometer.”) Was there any way to stop creeping capitalism and globalization? (“Not in my experience.”) What about Romania and Ceauşescu? (“Mistakes were made.”) Was he going out with Francesca, and if so, how far had he gotten?

At that point Vladimir wished he had been drunk already so that he could be charming and giddy with these pretty men and women in their Islamabad University T-shirts. Instead he managed a few shy gurgles. Oh, how he wished he had been in possession of a fur hat, a real Astrakhan shapka. For the first time in his life he was aware of the following useful axiom: It is far better to be patronized than to be ignored. Before he could act further on that impulse, Francesca summoned him from the kitchen.